Author: Zhuge Jianguo
In the past 2020, the global film industry has been deeply affected by the epidemic, and the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony has been postponed until April 25 this year, and the nomination for Best International Film will not be announced until March. Up to now, 88 countries or regions have announced the "Okio film", because last year's Korean film "Parasite" returned with a full load, and the Asian films sent this year have attracted special attention. Among them, although the Singapore film "Tropical Rain" is not prominent in popularity, it has won a number of honors in the Golden Horse Awards and the Pingyao International Film Festival, and its strength should not be underestimated.
Tropical Rain movie poster
From the scene of giving herself an ovulation injection in the car on a rainy day, the trivial daily life of a middle-aged woman slowly unfolds. Lim followed her husband from Malaysia to Singapore to work as a Chinese teacher at a high school. Family life frustrated her: her father-in-law was paralyzed and unable to speak and could not be taken care of; her husband was becoming increasingly cold, and he had been trying to get pregnant for many years, but the test results were always disappointing. Depression can not be solved in the career, the school has long ignored the Chinese class, and the students are becoming more and more perfunctory. Because of an extracurricular tutoring, student Guo Weilun walked into Lin Shuling's life, and the relationship between the two gradually changed...
Telling the breakthrough ethics of "extramarital affairs" and "teacher-student love", it is easy to fall into vulgar routines, director Chen Zheyi did the opposite, using cool tones and slow rhythms to present, which greatly reduced visual stimulation and showed mature image control. According to the customary cognition, tropical rain should be wet, ambiguous, and impulsive, but it is difficult for the audience to feel this in the film, and the heavy rain is always loud and fleeting, which cannot arouse any beautiful imagination. Even a short few minutes of large-scale drama are completely stripped of lust and present a depressing and distorted side.
At its root, the film does not intend to use various beautiful images to style this short encounter, but to spread from the intimate emotions in the family to the identity in society, spying on the many unspeakable pains in the hearts of the characters. Most of the time, Lin Shuling is like singing a one-man show, going to and from the hospital alone, taking care of the elderly alone, and attending a family banquet that is destined to be snubbed... As everyone knows, when he was still holding the hope of getting pregnant through auxiliary means, his husband was already having an affair. Guo Weilun's parents have been absent from home for a long time, and it is difficult to learn Chinese and martial arts that are increasingly undervalued, and it is difficult to have common topics with his peers. What they have in common is that they are both "marginal people" on both the family and social levels.
Therefore, this story points more to the pleasure of rebellion than to taboos. Emotions are not so sincere, teenagers are not as beautiful as imagined, Lin Shuling and Huang Weilun's purpose is not pure, one is the indifference of making up for the missing part of family and love from passive possession, and the other is the adolescent budding of the desire for mature female care and body. The two sat on the bus, and Lin Shuling stamped the folder with the words "Courtesy, Righteousness, Honesty and Shame" on the side of the hand, which shows that the relationship is essentially a rebellion of two losers against tradition and family.
Another deep emotional connection is the common cultural bloodline. Starting from the temporary transfer of the make-up class location to the home because the nanny took a leave of absence, the old man who loved to watch martial arts movies, Lin Shuling, who taught Chinese at school, and Chen Weilun, who practiced martial arts, formed a generally similar Chinese system. They all lack the right to speak, and choose to huddle together to warm up and fill the gap in family relations. From this point of view, "Tropical Rain" is small and big, which is not only a delicate individual emotional story, but also a powerful writing of the current situation of overseas Chinese society.
However, Lin Shuling's identity is doomed, even the resistance is passive, short-lived, fragile, and a heavy rain can wash away all hope. There are two rainstorm scenes in the film, one is that Lin Shuling had a dream of a baby lying in a cradle, was awakened by the sound of rain, and found that her father-in-law had died in his sleep. The last string that held the family together was broken. The other is under heavy pressure, the two broke up in the rain, Chen Weilun cried and said, "This is my first break-up, my heart hurts", although its childishness and exaggeration make people laugh, Lin Shuling still hugged back and comforted him, "It's all like this, you will get used to it later." Isn't this sentence meant to the powerless struggling self?
Overall, the film projects social issues such as immigration, women, education, and marriage, intertwined and looming. The image of tropical rain is complex - from continuous rain to torrential rain to the first break of the rainstorm, the change of the weather and the advanced divergence of synergistic emotions correspond to the process of a woman's efforts, depression, explosion, and relief, and the sad background gradually surfaces.
But it is not difficult to find that the creators still carry a lot of confusion and hesitation in where to seek solutions after resistance and shouting. Therefore, Lin Shuling's transformation back to her hometown in Malaysia after the divorce is somewhat hasty and abrupt. Whether the familiar hometown environment can completely heal the wounds is not yet known, and this may already be the most gentle way to deal with it. In the last few minutes of the film, there is no more line, the morning sun shines, the drying sheets flutter with the breeze, implicitly pointing out new hope.
Tropical rain, stopped. (Zhuge Jianguo)
Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel